The Apprentice - the K-12 Edition

The kids at Whampoa's learning programme have a business to run for the next few weeks: decide what to do with a newly donated set of clothes, work on a plan and execute the plan.

Kind of like The Apprentice, but no one gets fired.

Every Saturday from 10 30am to 1pm, my friends and I work with a bunch of 6 to 12-year-olds from the Whampoa neighborhood. The adults and teens running the programme are here on a volunteer basis, and so are the kids who attend the programme.

Our goal is to work with them to strengthen their life skills - in particular, building their confidence by bolstering their ability to communicate and collaborate.

On any given week, 10-12 kids come to class. (Half the number on the class register.)

On any given week, the volunteers go door-knocking, checking the attendance list to get the addresses of the kids who haven't shown up, going to their homes, sometimes waking up blurry-eyed kids hadn't gone to bed till 1am, and waiting for them to brush their teeth and get changed at 10 45am.

On any given week, I'm amazed and grateful that the kids and the volunteers come in faithfully to the void deck classroom at Block 75 Whampoa Drive.

What To Do With Donated Clothes?

Last weekend, the donated clothes arrived. The kids' got into groups with their volunteers to decide how best to make use of the clothes. The volunteers were the facilitators, the kids were the bosses.

"Sell the clothes and give the money to the less fortunate - like the people at Lee Ah Mooi old folks' home," said a 10-year-old.

"Sell the clothes and raise money for us - so that we can go to Universal Studio, buy games..." said a 12-year-old. Because most of the clothes were for teenage girls, he suggested we sell them in the markets in Geylang (high traffic area), get donations of make-up so that we have product bundles aimed at young women.

An 8-year-old said we should give the clothes to people who need them for free so that they could use whatever money they had to buy food instead.

The kids then presented their ideas to the class. They fell roughly into three camps: sell the clothes and funnel the money back into our learning programme; sell the clothes and donate the money to a non-profit that needs it more than we do; give the clothes away in the community.

How Now Brown Cow?

This week, the kids will think through their plans and agree on one option to work on as a class. And...they also need to think about where and how to store the clothes, which are currently sitting uncomfortably under a staffer's desk.

I've got no clue how today will go - but I'm sure it'll be as eye-opening for me this week as it was the previous class.

Footnote: Want to help? We need volunteers and we meet at 10am at Block 75 Whampoa Drive. We're part of Beyond Social Services. Volunteers' job description: Big brother, big sister, referee, good cop, bad cop, lesson planner, facilitator, clown, mentor, friend. Sometimes exasperating, often exhausting, always amazing. Two more classes in May, then we break for the June hols, and start again in July.

A New Year Reminder

It's the start of a new school year at the Saturday program where I volunteer. It's called LIFE: Learning is Fun and Exciting. With each semester comes a lot of planning, a lot of frustration, a lot of fun, and a lot of learning. Sometimes I wonder what progress we're making with the 6-12 year olds. 

We only see them once a week  - and that's when school's on. What impact could we possibly make? And when I waver, I think of lessons I've learned from a 9-year-old boy: a boy who taught me to connect, to seek to understand, and to persist. A boy who has become a reminder of why I continue to volunteer at Whampoa with Beyond Social Services.

The first time I met Hamid (not his real name), he was 9 and I had just started volunteerig.

When the other kids were sitting down and doing – whatever – reading, writing, making things. Hamid would suddenly jump out of his seat, run around, bang on tables, throw chairs. He would swear – in Malay. Loud and often.  He would call the other kids names. And he’d do that to the volunteers too, myself included. Then some of the other kids would follow. I’d come home from those sessions tired and disturbed.

“Why do you bother?” one of my friends said. “These kids from low income homes – they’ve got too many issues. You can’t change them – and you’ll just get upset.”

Why exactly? I don’t know. Probably because I was privileged enough to have had great teachers that made me love learning outside the classroom. Adults who exposed me to concerts, plays, books. And I wanted to pass that along.

At the weekend learning program, we make learning fun for primary school kids from low income homes - in a totally non-academic, weekend sort of way.  For instance - after a volcanic eruption in Indonesian a few years ago, we made a plasticine volcano, filled it with red food colouring and baking soda mixture so that when you add water, “lava” bubbles up. Then we have the kids read about and discuss volcanoes. Have them learn how to learn.

The kids were already rambunctious. And Hamid was often a disruptive influence. At first, I would work around them and be grateful if there wasn't trouble. A year into the program, I found him trying to write an English composition assignment for school. The topic: my favourite holiday.

He said he had no idea what to write.

"How about I interview and record you like I'm a reporter and you're on TV news?"

He said OK. Then I turned the iPhone recorder on. He smiled shyly, and he spoke. 

He aspired to be a football player. His favourite team was Man U. Of course.  He represented his school at sepak takraw. He’d been to Malacca to compete. They’d lost. But what mattered was that they’d showed teamwork. He liked mcdonalds. He wanted to be a policeman when he grew up. 

I played the video back to him and showed him that he had an outline for his essay. We talked. He wrote. 

More importantly, Hamid finally became more three-dimensional to me. Not a loud skinny kid who instigated other kids.

Working with him became slightly easier after that. He’d still blow up – but less often. And he’d also help keep the other kids in order. That’s when I learned lesson #1: to lead, you have to build trust. To build trust, you have to connect. To connect, you have to care.

What next?  Because Hamid was also part of other Beyond programs, I decided to exchange notes with a social worker who worked with him. She told me that Hamid had credibility with the other kids. But that he also had a tough home life. He was the oldest of 5 and was often left at home looking after the three boys and a girl while his mother was at work. A pretty heavy responsibility for anyone - let alone a pre-teen. I'd go crazy too.

Now that I had a bit more context, I could understand why he was so angry all the time. I realised he hated academics so I asked him what he wanted to to learn. He said he wanted to play chess. We got a volunteer to teach him. And I brought him to see grandmaster Gary Kasparov speak when Kasparov came to Singapore. He was rapt. Lesson #2: To be understood - seek to understand.

In the intervening months, and years,  Hamid seemed to mature. It wasn't just our program of course, there were the social workers, his school, his sports coach all working with him. There were still issues, but he was more respectful, more calm.

He passed his PSLE. Ended up in Normal Technical. He's now 15. I don’t see him much now as I work with the primary school kids. But I know he’s in the school football team and still part of Beyond. And  here’s my last Hamid story.

A couple years ago, he won an award: $400 voucher to buy a bike. He took the voucher home, gave it to his mother for groceries. The social workers asked him he didn’t get that bike he’d wanted to badly.

We need food and things for my family more than I need a bike, he said.

Hamid had started to grow up.

Lesson #3. Never, ever, give up.

I won't sugar coat it- it's tough working with those kids sometimes. I'm drained after each session. But I've gotten so much from them and I've learned so much. Especially from a skinny 9 year old who frustrated and annoyed me - but in the end taught me to care, to understand and to persist.

Brains and the Five Senses for breakfast

Today's class at Whampoa was all about the brain. Or at least the part of the brain that focuses on our sense of sight.

The science peeps worked on the lesson plan this week. And it was fun!

Wen Cong, our volunteer from Hwa Chong junior college, began with a starter of optical illusions. The kids were really into it. One lesson we learned was that something as simple as seating arrangements can make or break a fun session. Lesson - have more print outs next time and seat the kids closer by removing the table. We'll also use more print outs next time.

With the session on optical illusions Wen Cong also introduced the idea of rods and cones- and how we perceive colour. 

Then, Ching Hua led a session on the brain. She had spent two hours researching age-appropriate reading materials and kid friendly visuals. Paid off in spades.

The kids especially loved the 'ick' factor. You want to get their attention, try saying "this is what it would look like if you sliced my head into half sideways." while you turn your head and hold up a diagram of the brain. Ching Hua got lots of "ewwwww"s but the kids were so into it.

Working with such a wide range of ages, 6-12, is challenging, in the least. And pulling together material isn't always easy when all of us have full time jobs and no curriculum development training. Today's reading materials were geared towards several age groups and we were able to divide up the kids by reading ability.

Having enough volunteers to spend one-on-one time with them today was a real treat. I worked with a 10-year-old who has a reading level of a 7 or 8 year old. She's been fairly moody lately and through her community worker, we found out that one of her triggers is when she feels she's out of her depth and the other kids are "smarter."

So today, it was just Dyana and me. No comparisons, no distractions. We got through only two or three sentences about how our ears work. But hey, I was able to devote all my attention on her, and work with her to help her really read and understand.

More to come next week. Great to have such a fabulous group of volunteers. All in all it took 5 hours from Wen Cong and Ching Hua to put together today's 2-hour program for 8 kids. That's really labour intensive. Would love to have more kids join the program - and have more consistency in attendance among the kids who do come.

Today we also had a 14-year-old who came back to volunteers. She used to be part of our program. She got some of her secondary three year-end exam results back today. She got an A2 for her English final and a B3 English average for the year. Not bad considering she was barely passing last year.

She also got a B3 for her Chinese final. I told her I was really proud of her English grade, but I also said "work harder at your Chinese OK?" She comes from a Chinese speaking family and her Chinese is really really good. So I thought that would have been a A kinda subject.

To which she replied "But I got the highest in my class for Chinese!"

Ah...assumptions.

The Cello Fellow Visits

String and percussion ruled at Whampoa this morning.

We had a great time with Leslie Tan from the T'ang Quartet and his student David. We wanted to bring music into the Whampoa sessions and Leslie's been wanting to help out for a while so this morning, the kids rocked to classical - and some not so classical - music.

Our goals: to give the kids a window into types of music and instruments they're not familiar with, have them make their own "instruments" with rubber bands, ice cream sticks, plates, string (thanks Ching-Hua for the materials) and have them make music. More importantly, we wanted them to have fun while learning and doing new things.

We tried to figure out pop music David and Leslie could play and have the kids sing along to - so we thought - Justin Beiber? Adele? In the end, the kids spontaneously broke into National Day songs accompanied by David on the violin. Surprisingly fun. And they all seemed to know those songs.

Leslie and David started by telling them about the cello and the violin - and how classical musicians were the centuries ago pop stars - kinda sorta. The pair played a waltz, and told the kids that people centuries ago would dance to the music. "Like in a club?" asked Sameer.

They played some Bach, and asked the kids of the music sounded happy or sad. (Both, at various points). Then they played a duet and engaged the kids in a discussion about partnership and collaboration.

Then it was the kids' turn. They picked up their materials to make their own instruments. And wrote several sentences about their instruments - some with the help of volunteers. We found that having the kids write "scripts" before coming up to speak made some of them a lot less hesitant than they usually were and that the quality of what they presented was a lot better as well. So - something to keep.

We gave prizes for the most interesting instrument and best presentation. Some really interesting instruments including ones that looked like a submarine, a gun (don't ask), a UFO/ drum-set, and a string instrument in which one end of a string of rubber bands was anchored to the floor with an ice-cream stick and a kid's feet while the kid plucked the rubberband for sound.

Then David orchestrated them into doing Stand By Me with voice and percussion - using the kids' newly made instruments, along with hands, feet and chests.

At the end of the class, the kids asked if Leslie and David were coming back next weekend and could they please bring other instruments as well. So, here's to next weekend - when the kids will help compose a piece of music that Leslie and David will play - along with the kids.

Will this help the kids pass exams? No.
Will this make them future musicians? Unlikely.
But if this piqued their curiousity by opening a window to something new that they'll maybe enjoy - that's something.

Not quite El Sistema, but - hey, one day.

Yes We Can

What makes a good juggler? Practice.

When you let go, amazing things happen.

Last Saturday at Whampoa, a 10-year-old who had never spoken up or answered questions in class got up and not only led her group in a presentation – she did an entire demo. Brief, to the point, and effective, Anna (all kids' names have been changed)  and her three team-mates told us to stand on one foot, and then close our eyes and continue to stand on one foot. Then she explained why it’s a more difficult to balance when you close your eyes.

Then another group got up and read an entire story they’d written - out loud, in unison. It was about an alien with 24 arms and 5 legs discovering juggling and then practicing really hard to win an intergalactic talent competition. It had a well-organised, credible plot.  Well-illustrated too.

At first I thought the 10-year-old, in the group Andy, had written the story and the rest had just drawn and coloured. It turns out that it was Shah, one of the 8-year-olds, who came up with most of the plot - and Andy was mainly the scribe.

We wouldn’t have discovered what the kids were capable of if we hadn’t let go of the agenda and improvised a little.

At the beginning of the session, we had a guest: the amazing Mickael Bellemene, contact juggler. Link here He gave the kids a preview of his gravity defying act and talked about how much he loved his craft even as a kid (didn’t like school), how much he practiced (the whole day for days on end, at one time - until he got injured) and how important it was to do things well.

Then we asked the kids to get in groups of four, come up with questions of their own, research the answers, and present - to everyone.

As with the past two sessions, we modelled the hour after Sugata Mitra's Self Organised Learning Framework in which four kids choose their own teams, share one PC, research and discuss answers, and present. The adults stayed away unless asked to help. In our case, we discovered that when we did that, the kids tended to copy and paste facts off the web, and then present stuff they didn't really understand.

We've been working on how to get over this - and the solution turned out really differently between the two groups of kids. The volunteers on Anna’s team first helped the girls come up with a narrow enough question. From my end of the room I heard words like fulcrum, flexible, balance from Anna’s group. First-time volunteer, Beverly, engaged the normally shy Anna like no one had been able to before. She and another volunteer, Hui, helped the kids come up with progressively more biteable chunks of information they could work on. 

  

On the other end of the room, Andy's group wanted to find out how aliens juggle. They went online, found some "Roswell" / alien-sighting sites, but in the end, no one could agree if the web could tell them definitively whether aliens exist. Hence the tale of Intergalactic Creatures Have Talent. Worked out fine, in my view. 

If they two things the team took away were:

- Google doesn't know EVERYTHING - really!

- and "hey, I can write and tell a pretty darn good story!"

then we'd done some really nice work that day - both the adults and the kids.

 My lesson for the day: relax, look, listen, learn. Be amazed.

Could Robots Rule the World One Day? Another SOLE weekend.

At Whampoa, our SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environment) experiment continues. It's an education - for us the adult volunteers, the senior high-school/ junior college volunteers, and the kids.

Over the past three Saturdays, we've pretty much followed the Sugata Mitra's SOLE framework: 8-12 year olds get to choose their own groups, one laptop per four-child group to research a question, each group has a helper - the only kid in the group who's allowed to be the conduit between the group and the adults, and the adults step in only when asked/ approached.

Today's questions:
1. Why are bruises purple?
2. Could robots rule the world one day?

The second question got some really interesting answers. The kids talked, wrote stuff, and didn't seem to have a consensus. One of the girls said robots were really smart and could build / make things. And that robots could be very scary - like if they were used in wars. They decided "maybe" robots could rule the world - because they could destroy buildings and could be used as weapons.


But robots could rule the world only if humans were scared of them. "But only god can destroy the world," added one boy earnestly. The oldest kid in the group was maybe 10. And a 5-year-old sneaked in today. He was the group's illustrator. He was also the one who told us, very seriously, that the Transformers are not real. They were drawn by computers - to which a 10-year-old piped up with "CGI!"

Did the group have fun? The Robot team did.

The Bruise team got a little ... bruised because the workload ended up being lopsided and one person ended up doing most of the work. That's something we're going to have to work on.

It's a process of adjustment and tweaking. Step in too much and the groups lose their autonomy. Stand back too much and the groups wouldn't get as much out of this as they could. It's so difficult for most of us adults not to plunge in and "guide" or get involved.

Lots of other kinks to work through - but one step at a time. 

I have learned one thing though. I've realised that if I were to boil down what I wish our education system could deliver to our kids - it's Confidence, Curiousity, and the ability to Collaborate. Much more useful than chasing Cars, Condos and Country Club memberships in my view.

When I was a kid, the acceptable middle class professions were Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer. The path seemed pretty clear cut. In this century however, who knows what types of jobs the future will deliver? 10 years ago, the phrase "Social Media Strategist" hardly existed. What will work look like when these 8 year olds start their professions?

This much I do know - curiousity would propel kids to ask questions, look for answers and find ever better ways of doing things; confidence would give them the self-belief to understand they have to be masters of their destinies. And they could be the smartest kids on earth, but without enough emotional intelligence to collaborate with others, the highest IQ in the world wouldn't help a bright child live up to his or her potential.

How Do Mozzies See - and other big questions

A really astounding morning at Whampoa today!

My friend and fellow volunteer Hui-e and I attended TEDxSingapore a couple of weeks ago and saw a video of TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra talk about his experiments with Self Organised Learning Environments and the future of learning: http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html

So, we tried it out at Whampoa with our 7-12 year olds. today. In a nutshell:

• Ching-Hua and Priya (both also volunteers) worked on what Mitra called the "Big" questions - aimed at piqueing kids' curiousity. The questions had to be phrased in a not too concrete manner to leave room for, well, thinking.
• We asked the kids to pick their own groups of four...one group had three because we had 11 kids today. 
• Each group selected a question from our list:
• How do mosquitoes see?
• Why's the sky blue?
• Where does petrol come from?
• Then we left them the heck alone. Kinda. Each group had a "helper" who were the only conduit to the volunteers and vice versa. So, if they had questions, the helper had to speak to an adult. If there were things the kids were unhappy with, they had to go through the helper.

I gotta tell ya - I wasn't sure where this would go. I'd been fully prepared that some kids would run around, not want to do the work, prefer to be at the playground or playing boardgames. But wow, they all got down to it.